Police: Report of the Committee on Standards in Public Life

Lord Wasserman Excerpts

Monday 23rd November 2015 Grand Committee

[Lord Wasserman (Con)]

My Lords, I, too, wish to thank the noble Earl, Lord Lytton, for initiating this debate. The noble Earl has had a long interest in policing generally and in the integrity and accountability of police leaders in particular. It is no surprise, therefore, that he has pressed for a debate on this important report on his specialist subject. I also congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Bew, and his committee on having decided to turn their attention to policing and on producing a report on this subject which is substantial, not only in size but in content.

Police leadership, ethics and accountability have been very much in the news in recent years. Hillsborough and the Stephen Lawrence case continue to attract attention, although the events to which they refer occurred decades ago. Moreover, those issues show no sign of going away. As recently as last Saturday morning, the media were full of stories about the leadership of the Metropolitan Police having to apologise publicly for the behaviour of undercover officers who had “violated the human rights” of women with whom they had had relationships in circumstances which the Met had to admit were a blatant “abuse of police power”.

So it is not surprising that the Committee on Standards in Public Life, whose mission is to advise the Prime Minister on ethical standards across the whole of public life and to monitor and report on issues relating to the standards of conduct of all public officeholders, should have decided that the time had come to turn its attention to policing. The only surprise about that decision is that it took it so long to get around to it. The committee was established more than 20 years ago and this is its 15th report. I should have thought, given the critical importance of honesty, integrity, openness and impartiality in policing, and the public’s concern about how far the police actually incorporate these values in their day-to-day activity, that the committee would have put the police several places higher on its priority list for review. Be that as it may, I am delighted that the committee finally focused on this important public service and I join other noble Lords in congratulating the noble Lord, Lord Bew, and his committee.

At the end of what appears to have been a very thorough and comprehensive review of the leadership, ethics and accountability arrangements in our 43 local police forces, the committee came up with 20 main recommendations, several divided into sub-recommendations. There is not nearly enough time in this very short debate to deal with all or even most of these recommendations. All I intend to say is that while I support most of them, there are a few which I feel are a bit too prescriptive and others where I feel that the committee has not been prescriptive enough and has taken the easy way out by passing the buck to the Home Office to put things right.

For example, chapter 5, where the committee discusses the accessibility to the public of information about the performance of their police force, says:

“The public needs to access information to scrutinise the performance of their local police force and to hold the PCC to account”.

Who could possible object to this statement of the obvious? However, when it comes to recommending how this openness should be encouraged and monitored, the committee makes no proposals of its own but simply endorses the recommendation of the National Audit Office that the Home Office should report on how it plans to increase data availability and accessibility to help the public hold PCCs to account. I found this rather disappointing, to say the least.

Sadly, it is not the only case in which the committee deals with a difficult issue by handing it off to the Home Secretary for action. I would not have bothered to highlight this aspect of the committee’s recommendations if I did not think that it reflected what I regard as an important misunderstanding about the way local policing is presently organised. In short, I feel that the committee, by putting forward recommendations of this kind, has either not understood, or perhaps not quite accepted, the world of local policing as it is following the coming into force of the Police Reform and Social Responsibility Act 2011—that is, the world of local policing post the introduction of PCCs. In this world, whether we like it or not—I know that many noble Lords do not like it at all—it is the responsibility of PCCs, among other things, to provide adequate information about the performance of their forces and it is up to the public, either through the ballot box or through community groups or specialist organisations such as CoPaCC, mentioned in the report, to ensure that they do.

Even the National Audit Office recognises this. In the third paragraph of this report’s admirable executive summary, the committee quotes with approval the NAO’s statement that the present model of local policing is one of “democratic accountability” in which,

“the public will have elected Police and Crime Commissioners and will be holding them to account for how policing is delivered through their force”.

It could not be clearer, so I do not for a moment believe that the Home Office has no role to play in local policing—far from it. I believe strongly that the Home Office has a vital role to play in local policing, for example, by ensuring that the laws on our statute books reflect the evolution of criminal behaviour; by establishing and maintaining strong national policing agencies to tackle crimes such as human trafficking, cybercrime and economic crime, which cannot be tackled effectively locally; and, of course, by arguing the case for local policing when public expenditure totals come to be distributed between competing public services. But when it comes to most of the issues discussed in this report, the buck must stop with the people directly elected to deliver policing services to their communities. They have the power; they must be held accountable for using it.

Devolution of power to local level does not always work as we would like it to. It is always easier to blame central government for everything that goes wrong locally. But giving local communities responsibility for the professional men and women employed to meet their policing needs must be right. We must give it time to work.